Photography Is about What Is

Old barn near Collegedale, Tennessee.

The distinctive thing about photography, the feature that distinguishes it from all the other arts, is its direct and essential connection to reality. Simply put, you can't photograph something unless it exists. Photography is about what is.

A painter can make a painting that may or may not resemble reality, but it will have no intrinsic connection to reality. Someone can use AI to make a creation that looks like a photograph in every detail. It may be very well done, but it is not a photograph. 

A photograph is a picture made by light rays. The word "photograph" is made from two Greek words: "photos,"which means "light," and 'graphos," which means "to write." So, to photograph means "to write with light." 

A photograph is a picture made by the action of light reflected from something that really exists onto a sensitized surface. Light rays bouncing off something that has objective reality are recorded onto film, a sensor of some kind, or something not yet invented, but whatever it is, it is "writing with light." The unique power of photography is derived from this direct connection to reality. 

The unique purpose of photography is to show what things look like in the real world. As distinguished from other visual media, the art of photography is primarily the art of seeing. The great photographer Dorothea Lange kept a quotation by the English essayist Francis Bacon on her darkroom door: “The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention."

Painters, those who alter and/or combine photographs, and those who use AI to create "photographs" will tell you that they are only limited by their imaginations. And that's precisely the point -- they are limited by their imaginations. They can only do what they can imagine. But photography goes beyond human imagination. AI can never replace photography, because photography is the art of wonder.

 Who could have imagined a laughing horse?

The magic of photography is that life holds so many amazing and wonderful things that are entirely unanticipated, unexpected, even unimagined in the deepest sense; that is, no one would ever have thought of such a thing happening. And then, suddenly, right out of the fabric of life, there it is. 

"I can do a beautiful illustration, but it doesn't have that 'instant of wonder' that a photograph will have." (Art Director Tony Anthony, quoted in Photo District News.)

Photography shows us things that lie beyond our imagination and compel our amazement because they really happened. It revels in the beauty, the mystery, and the strangeness of life. It is the most powerful purely visual medium ever created.

Our work as photographers is to isolate and clarify the things we see so that others may through us see in a new way the world that is around them. 

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 2011-2025 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography     philosophy of photography   AI

A Lifetime of Great Dogs: V

 Bounce with our grandsons Nathan and Michael. "Will someone get these kids offa' me!?

We'll get back to Bounce in a few minutes, but first, I want to introduce Honey. In early 2000, one of the doctors with whom Louise worked in the emergency room at Hutchinson Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe gave us a puppy. Her mother was a purebred Labrador, and her father, a purebred German Shepherd. When I first saw her, I said, "She's a honey!" And so she was -- a honey of a dog; also our longest-lived one. She lived to be almost 15. She had the gentle nature of a Labrador, but when she thought it was necessary she could produce a most authentic German Shepherd bark. Honey was sweet-natured, but always a serious dog.

Honey-Puppy, as she arrived at her new home. She was always a serious dog.

In 2002, Don and Kim, our son and daughter-in-law gave us a Boston Terrier named Bounce. He had a most distinctive personality and brought a lot of enjoyment into our lives, even though our time with him was brief.

One afternoon, as Louise and I were clearing some brush from the pasture down near the creek, Bounce followed Honey to the creek. Sometime later, when it was time to go back to the house, Honey came, but Bounce was not with her. We found him several days later. He had drowned. We buried him beside Max, with much grief.

Rusty and his best friend, Louise.

About a year later, Louise noticed a golden retriever type dog hanging around our mailbox for several days as she would come and go. One day, he followed her home. She drove into the garage, and before she could close the door, he came in. She opened the car door and he laid his head on her lap and looked at her with soulful eyes. He was our dog from that moment on. We named him Rusty. He was the sweetest dog we have ever owned.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 2011-2025 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography     family history   dogs

The Backroads Traveler: LaFayette, Georgia

 The 1836 Marsh-Warthen House, LaFayette.

 LaFayette is a small city in, and the county seat of, Walker County in the extreme northwest corner of Georgia. It's also the Georgia small town with which I am most familiar, because I lived in Walker County for 33 years.

Founded as Chattooga in 1835, as the Cherokee nation was struggling unsuccessfully to hold on to their homeland, the town was renamed LaFayette in 1836, in honor of the French Marquis who fought with the American forces in the Revolutionary War. Current population is about 7,000.

The surrounding county has a fair amount of industry, including the Roper Corporation, which makes GE appliances. Much of the area is given over to farming, with many beef and dairy operations.

LaFayette, by the way, is pronounced "LaFAYette," not the conventional "LaFayETTE." However, the downtown square is pronounced "LaFayETTE" Square. Go figure. 

The Marsh House, also known as the Marsh-Warthen House, was built in 1836 by Spencer Stewart Marsh, a prominent businessman who founded a major cotton mill in Trion. The house was owned by his descendants for 150 years.

During the Civil War, Union cavalrymen stabled their horses in the house. Bullet holes from the Battle of LaFayette are still visible in the walls. Check their website for the tour schedule, because it varies considerably according to the time of year. http://marshhouseoflafayette.org/. 423-994-8485. 

The Chattooga Academy.

The  Chattooga Academy was built in 1836 of bricks made at Rock Spring, a few miles north of LaFayette. Believed to be the oldest brick schoolhouse in Georgia, it cost $815 to build and has one large room on each floor with a chimney at each end. The Presbyterians used it as their meeting house until their church was built in 1848.

 

 The LaFayette First Presbyterian Church.

Just north of the town square is the First Presbyterian Church. Erected in 1848 in the Greek Revival architectural style so popular in the early and middle 19th century, it is still an active church. It served as a hospital for both Confederate and Union wounded after the Battle of LaFayette in June of 1864.

 A TRIBUTE TO A TIME THAT WAS.

Breakfast at Susie’s on the square. A LaFayette tradition for many years.

The name of Susie’s Café on the square in LaFayette was officially Susie’s Sunset Café. But I always thought it should have been named Susie’s Sunrise Café, because the early morning sun streamed in through the plate-glass front and illuminated everything all the way to the back wall.

Susie’s had booths down each side for those who preferred a feeling of relative privacy, but it also had a couple of long tables down the center where lawyers, businessmen, farmers, factory workers, and gas station attendants ate their breakfasts together and chewed the fat (no reflection on the bacon) in peaceable equanimity.

Susie's is gone now, and places like it in other small towns are a dwindling species.  Increasingly, you will find the old timers' morning coffee club at a Hardy's or McDonald's. A sad sign of the times.

The photos: The Marsh House was photographed with a Fuji X-T20 and the Fujinon XC 16-50mm lens. For the Chattooga Academy photo, I used an Olympus E-M5 with the Panasonic Lumix G-Vario 14-140mm lens, and for the church, the same camera with a Panasonic Lumix G-Vario 12-32mm lens. The photograph in Susie's Café was made with a small, quiet, Olympus SPn rangefinder camera loaded with color negative film.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 2011-2025 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography    digital photography     travel     Fuji X-T20 camera      Fujinon XC 16-50mm lens     Olympus E-M5 camera    Walker County, Georgia     Marsh-Warthen House     Chattooga Academy     Panasonic Lumis G-Vario 12-32mm lens     Panasonic Lumix G-Vario 12-32mm lens     film photography     Olympus SPn rangefinder camera

The Photographer's Eye

 Demented spider. GA. Highway 193, Walker County.

 (Adapted and expanded from a post on September 15, 2021.)

 What does it mean to have a photographer's eye?

I think the indispensable ability is the ability to notice things. Most of us bumble through life half-aware of our surroundings. And then we pick up a camera and expect to start seeing interesting things. It doesn't work that way. We have to develop the habit of being aware of the world around us at all times, not just on demand. That's the difference between photographers who regularly produce good pictures and those who, infrequently or never, have a lucky accident.

Ford 8N tractor in shed, U.S. Highway 19, Lumpkin County, Georgia.

After the ability to notice things comes a sense of light. Very often, it's the light itself that makes a subject noticeable. Learn to study light -- observe how it falls at different times of the day and different seasons of the year until you can almost feel the way it works with your subject. This is a lifelong learning process and I'm still working at it.

Bottoms up! Diving swans on Berry College campus, Rome, Georgia.

The third element is composition -- the ability to arrange the subject in the camera's viewfinder so that whatever it is that caught your eye stands forth most clearly. If necessary, zoom your lens or move, so that your frame is clean and uncluttered, including only the essential elements that tell the story.

Good street photographers such as Elliott Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson have an almost magical ability to simultaneously notice both a subject and the light and compose a photograph in an instant. Others, myself included, are not so fast. But not all kinds of photography demand such quick reflexes. Jay Maisel notices and photographs an incredible number of interesting subjects. Some of them do demand quick reflexes, but many of them are just sitting there, as it were, waiting for someone to notice and photograph them.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said,

                "The world is so full of a number of things                                                                     I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Photos: The spider: Canon EOS A2, 28-105mm RF lens, Fujichrome 100 film. The tractor: Canon EOS 5D Classic, 24-85mm EF lens. The swans: Olympus OM2n, Zuiko 85mm lens, Kodachrome 64 film.

Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $3.95 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Photography and text copyright 2011-2025 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography    photography techniques     film photography     Canon EOS A2 film camera      Canon 28-105mm EF lens     Fujichrome 100 film    Walker County, Georgia     digital photography     Canon EOS 5D Classic     Canon 24-85mm EF lens     Olympus OM2n film camera     Zuiko 85mm lens     Kodachrome 64 film